The New Messiah Craze

There was no dancing here on the night before the massacre, December 28, 1890, but for almost a year “the Messiah craze” had spread throughout the newly sectioned Native reservations, as unstoppable as a prairie fire. A committee of Sioux holy men had returned from Nevada, where they’d met Wovoka, the Paiute who’d seen the original vision. They returned as disciples of a new religion.

Wovoka designed the ritual from his own visions. Erect a sapling in the middle of an open area—the tree, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, then banned by reservation agents. Purge yourselves, enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious. Show your humility—some warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness of their selflessness.

Then dance—women and men together, something rare in Sioux religious tradition. Dance around that sapling totem, dance and dance and dance and don’t stop until you fall from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude. Dance until the mind numbs and the spirit emerges. Dance into frenzy. Dance into spiritual ecstacy because the promise itself is so wonderful.

The Ghost Dance was a frenetic hobgoblin of Christianity, mysticism, Native ritual, and sheer desperation. If they would dance, they believed Christ would return because he’d heard their prayers and felt their suffering. When he’d come for them, he’d bring with him the old ones (hence, the Ghost Dance). And the buffalo would return. Once again the people could take up their beloved way of life. If they would dance, a cloud of dust from the new heaven and the new earth would swallow the wasicu, all of them. If they would dance, their hunger would be satiated, desperation comforted.

Imagine, here, in all this open space, three hundred men and women being slain by the spirit, most of them writhing in fine dust. Such mass frenzy made wasicu, the white man, of every denomination or political persuasion wary, madness on a cosmic scale—hence, “the Messiah craze.”

The exultation of the Ghost Dance was the vision given to those who fell in frenzy. When they would recover their senses, each of them would reveal what he or she had seen, a collective vision: life would be good, rich, abundant, everything the coming of the wasicu had ended. Jesus Christ, rejected by his own, had heard the voice of the people’s suffering and would bring them joy.

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney in his rich study written already in 1896, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.” It was that simple and that compelling, a vision of heaven.

For me as a white man, a Christian, it is not pleasant to admit that in the summer of 1890, the sheer desperation of Native people, fueled by poverty, malnutrition, and the near death of their culture, created a tragically false religion that played a significant role in what we’ve come to call, simply, Wounded Knee.

Throughout the West, the whole First Nation danced. What was peculiar to the Lakota, however, was this solitary tenet: those who wore the ghost shirt or ghost dress—the prescribed apparel of the faith—could assume themselves impervious to bluecoat bullets. Dancers could not die. They were holy.

It would be dead wrong to assume that that particular belief or any other created by the Messiah craze was the single cause for the horror that happened here in December, 1890. Others are far more prominent: the disappearance of the buffalo, the unceasing trek of white settlers onto traditional Lakota land, a long history of broken treaties, distrust on every side, the searing memory of “Custer’s Last Stand,” and, perhaps most of all, the inability of two peoples to understand each other. When you look down on the shallow valley of the Wounded Knee, bear in mind that what happened here is the confluence of many motives, some of them even well-meaning, but all of them, finally, tragic.

The Ghost Dance swept though Native nations because it offered divine solutions immediate to problems most Native people could not help but feel were insurmountable. They were coming to the end of their entire way of life. Their only comfort was faith because faith, as the Bible says, is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Faith filled their hearts. Nothing else could or would.

In March, a national poll by Monmouth University indicated that 65% of Republicans still believed that Biden's victory came as a result of voter fraud, and that nearly a third of all Republicans claimed they would never accept the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential election. They are, to be sure, true believers. Their faith is in Trump. They believe him with the sheer force of nothing less than pure faith in "the evidence of things not seen." 

On Monday, the FBI warned lawmakers that online Qanon conspirators may carry out more acts of violence as they move from serving as "digital soldiers" to taking action in the real world following the January 6 US Capitol attack. Even though some of the faith's most trusted tenets have not come true or occurred, many of it's disciples have not abandoned the faith. 

At Wounded Knee, some of the slain died because they believed the bullets of the 7th Cavalry wouldn't touch them. They were wrong. Throughout the west, the Ghost Dance died because no matter how hard the people danced and prayed, the promises were never fulfilled.

What exactly does the future hold here in our land? Only those who believe in Donald J. Trump know, but they think they know only because they so strongly believe.